A ringleader in a global monkey torture network exposed by the BBC has been charged by US federal prosecutors.

Michael Macartney, 50, who went by the alias “Torture King”, was charged in Virginia with conspiracy to create and distribute animal-crushing videos.

Mr Macartney was one of three key distributors identified by the BBC Eye team during a year-long investigation into sadistic monkey torture groups.

Two women have also been charged in the UK following the investigation.

Warning: This article contains disturbing content

Mr Macartney, a former motorcycle gang member who previously spent time in prison, ran several chat groups for monkey torture enthusiasts from around the world on the encrypted messaging app Telegram.

  • @BonesOfTheMoon
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    07 months ago

    Animals are not food, they have a right to live like anyone else. Hunting is cruel and factory farming is cruel, and all the nonsense of pasture raised animal agriculture is also cruel, and all the carnists mental gymnastics about how one is ok and the other is not is absurd. There’s no good reason we should murder animals.

    • gimpchrist
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      47 months ago

      Everything on this planet is food … including us. Every single thing on this planet eventually is food for something else. It’s not cruelty, it’s not evil, it’s not barbarism, it’s not wrong, it is life on planet Earth. Eating food does not have to come with torture. There is a gigantic difference and it is important to make that distinction, otherwise we will rip ourselves and this planet to pieces.

        • gimpchrist
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          07 months ago

          I’m not hurting anything. And I won’t be hurting myself by not eating food if it comes down to it. I am part of the Earth and I will participate while I’m here.

    • @Dasus
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      7 months ago

      Animals literally are food.

      All animals are. And we too, are animals.

      For what, that’s a different question. Literally every living thing gets consumed by other living things as a part of nature. Well, putting aside “artificial” things like being blasted to dust in a furnace, and even then, you can be used to fertilise plants, meaning another living thing is consuming you.

      Just how naive do you have to be to think that nothing should ever die, or if it does, that it should never be consumed by another living thing? That’s illogical and crazy.

      So… you would rather destroy whole environments, entire species, than accept that hunting is necessary? Because it is. It’s necessary for the environment and it saves lives (because overpopulated deer cause more accidents because of constant migration and just the sheer amount of them.)

      You don’t understand what the word “murder” means.

      This sort of absolutism is exactly why veganism has such a poor rep.

      It’s clearly a personal thing for you. This is part of your identity, but not something you’ve actually researched or thought about. It shows from the way you use expressions like “carnist mental gymnastics” while not being able to accept literally unchangeable facts of nature and crying that a deer who lived in the wild was equally tortured as a livestock animal who may have lived their entire lives without being able to even turn around in their cage.

      You’re about as good for animals and equally ironic as PETA.

      • @BonesOfTheMoon
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        07 months ago

        I don’t think I’ve ever read a stupider bunch of nonsense in my life. Animals are not food.

          • @[email protected]
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            07 months ago

            Other animals, but they don’t call what they eat “food”. Do you understand or do I need to use pictures to explain to you?

            • @magnusrufus
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              17 months ago

              Actually if you think you are making a valid coherent point please go into further detail. As I see it what they call or don’t call what they eat doesn’t change what it fundamentally is. Shark food is animals. Translate that into shark if you like but the meaning doesn’t change.

              • @[email protected]
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                17 months ago

                Sharks don’t have the same self-reflective mechanism we do, I mean they recognise we aren’t very good food but other than that they don’t think “should I eat this?”.

                Simply put we do have the capacity for that and should maybe act on it.

                • @magnusrufus
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                  17 months ago

                  What does that have to do with what constitutes food? Food is what is eaten for sustenance. Sharks eat animals. No they don’t reflect on the morality of it but that has nothing to do with the reality that sharks eat animals for food. Animals are food. When you talk all carnivores and parasites and such out of feeding on animals then we can say that animals are not food. Us having the capacity and the will to be morally selective about our choice of food doesn’t make animals not food.

        • @Dasus
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          -17 months ago

          I don’t even believe you read it, tbh.

          Please name a foodstuff that wasn’t originally from a living organism. I’ll wait.